What the house is for, in one sentence, and the four things that follow from it. Social rule sets are invisible, and the work is to make them visible, nameable and changeable by the people living inside them.
The instruments read publics in their own words, in public, with the query printed beside every number, and hand the read back to the people it describes.
Every group runs on rules nobody wrote down: what counts as trying too hard, who is allowed to be sincere, which reference marks you as inside or outside, what a silence means. People obey these rules closely and can rarely state them. That gap is the whole subject.
The move is three steps, in order, and the order matters:
Read a public at scale, in its own words, without asking it to describe itself. What a group says about why it does something is a different object from what it does.
A rule that cannot be stated in a sentence has not been found yet. Naming is the step that turns a pattern into something a person can hold, argue with, and check against their own experience.
Once a rule is named it becomes a choice. Follow it deliberately, break it deliberately, or leave. All three are choices a person can make once the rule has a name.
Does this give the person more authorship over their own social reality, or less?
Every instrument is checked against that question before it ships, and the question decides what a reading is for. Alongside what a brand's own research can ask an audience, a reading here is written so that it can be handed to the people it describes and survive being handed to them.
The practical consequence is a rule about what a reading is made of. A group is described here by its rule sets and its evidence rather than by its demographics. Demographics describe people to somebody else; rule sets describe a world to the people in it.
GOSSIP: the grassroots open-source social intelligence platform.
Gossip is the original social intelligence technology. It is how groups have always tracked who is doing what, who can be trusted, where the boundary of the group sits, and what the unwritten rules currently are. The anthropological literature reads it the same way: talk about people is how a community maintains itself, marks its edges, and keeps cooperation going without a police force. The word carries a reputation the literature does not support.
Naming the platform after it is a claim about method. The read comes from what publics say to each other, in the places they say it. A survey asks people to describe themselves; this reads what they already said. The two are different objects, and both are worth having.
Grassroots is the load-bearing word in the expansion: the corpus is fed by the people it reads, and the read travels back to them. That two-way traffic is what the word gossip names.
The platform is built in three tiers, and the tiers are separated by who owns what rather than by what you pay.
fig 1 . the three tiers
| Tier | What it is | Licence |
|---|---|---|
| 1 . the corpus | The open database of observations and the sources behind them. This host. | ODbL 1.0 + DbCL 1.0 |
| 2 . your workspace | Your own saved queries, boards, working notes and unshared drafts. | yours, private |
| 3 . commissioned work | Produced works made to order. Not served from any gossip host and not described here. | proprietary |
The platform code is separate again, under AGPL-3.0. Tier 3 is barred from every gossip host by house rule, because a client deliverable served from the same host as the open corpus is one misconfiguration away from the thing the boundary exists to prevent.
Grassroots, in practice: the corpus is public and the arithmetic behind every reading is printed beside it, so anyone can point it at a source it does not hold, or check a number and say what they got instead. Everything that arrives is read by a person before it enters anything.
A version of the corpus will always be publicly available under a free and open licence. That promise is meant to survive any change of ownership or control, and it is the thing a contributor relies on. It is written into the draft contributor terms as the constraint on everything else in them.
The boundary between the open house and a person's own workspace is the bargain made visible: you read and contribute in the open, and you cross into your own station. A boundary you can see in the address bar explains the exchange better than a modal does.
the thesis is older than this house. the written record still names the previous house and is on the rebrand list.